Archive for August 2017

A Wednesday Politico cartoon mocking conservatives caught in Texas flooding was condemned by media outlets across the political spectrum.

“The first problem with the cartoon is its crassness,” Aaron Blake wrote in a thorough take-down at The Washington Post. “People are still being saved, and it’s making fun of those same people. The second problem is the stereotypes. It’s almost a caricature of what you’d expect a liberal cartoonist to draw in response to conservative Texans relying upon the government in their time of crisis.”

The explanation for this apparent madness is that the left — both the scribblers and the shock troops — bear all the characteristics of a mob, as set forth more than a century ago by the father of group-think, French psychologist Gustave Le Bon. No behavior of the left is mysterious if you’ve read Le Bon — or “Demonic.” In The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, Le Bon observed that the “complete lack of critical spirit” prevents crowds from “perceiving … contradictions.”